Love to eat crispy roasted nuts and potato wafers that are high in salt? Beware, besides harming your heart, it may also harm your brain and lead to dementia, researchers have warned. In mice, the high-salt diet reduced the resting cerebral blood flow by 28% in the cortex and 25% in the hippocampus – brain regions involved in learning and memory. This impairment in the blood flow to the brain was caused by a decrease in the production of nitric oxide – a gas generated by endothelial cells – the…

Intestinal worm is a common problem in growing children, particularly from developing countries. There are many causes to this parasitical infection which mainly arises due to unhygienic conditions. One of the most common modes of infection is consuming undercooked meat. In many places, particularly roadside stalls, meat dishes are not always prepared with utmost care. As such the infectious worms growing in the meat get transferred to your body, where it adheres itself to the intestinal walls, acting like a parasite where it draws nutrition from the host’s body to…

You can teach yourself to hate pizza and chocolate Imagine that as soon as a piece of chocolate melts and flows down your throat, you start feeling nauseous, lightheaded, and run to throw up inside the toilet bowl.The goal is to make you ill every time you think about or encounter the problem food. Will it work? It is the basis of the “false memory diet” pioneered by Elizabeth Loftus and her colleague Daniel Bernstein.The duo planted food aversions in peoples’ minds by playing a memory game with more steps…

Helping others can add years to your life. A 20-year-long study of survival data for more than 500 people aged 70-103 years that has recently been published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior found that people who occasionally watched and cared for others lived longer than people who didn’t. Among the study’s subjects were grandparents who were not the primary caregivers for their grandchildren, but still took care of them on an occasional basis. The researchers also looked at people without children who took care of other people. The…